Football Customisation Guide

Making for an incredible promotional product option, designing a football offers you a huge range of possibilities to choose from. If you choose to get these promo gifts from Pavilion, here are the options you'll have before you.

Football Customisation Options

For a lot of our balls, we offer complete customisation options. This list includes all four balls listed below. The standard football has 32 panels on it, and what means for you, is that you have 32 panels for you to customise. If you would like your logo on it once, twice, three or 32 times, the choice is yours. We have a few popular graphics which you can add your logo to but if there was anything specific you wanted, let our team know and we can create the perfect design for you.

The same options apply to most of our balls, although the panel number options can vary. For instance, we have a 6 panel ball you can design (at either a size 5 option or our football key ring), but we also have mini balls, which are made up of 12 panels.

The vintage footballs are made up of 18 brown leather panels, and although you do have full design control here, we recommend that you print a single logo or name in black or gold.

If you would like to work on your own 32 panel or 12 panel design, then you can do by downloading the blank template below, and emailing it across with your enquiry.

The tip here with your logo is to keep it simple. Footballs are generally printed by the screen method and thus you are looking to create a design with simple spot colours. You can print footballs by a digital printing method but that is expensive and the subject of another blog.

Complex logos and fine lines within the design will be lost on a screen printed ball but bold blocks of colour look really good. The price of the promotional ball is dependent on the number of colours printed so unless you have to try to keep these to a minimum. Remember that the material itself comes in different colours so that allows for panels to be completed ‘flooded’ with colour as well.

What should I put on my design?

It's a tricky thing to decide, but luckily for you, we wrote a blog piece about the best and worst thing to include in a design. You can read our piece entitled "A Marketer's Guide to Customising Promotional Products" which discusses items such as whether to include social media links or a personalised message.

Football Sizes

The standard football is a size 5. The advantage of the size 5 is that it will provide a large surface for branding which not only stands out a lot more, but it's size is more attractive to people, makign them want to pick it up and play with it. The size 5 is not the only size however, and you may wish to consider the smaller mini footballs which are cheaper, but also make for great quick giveaways. Being cheaper may give you greater volume of giveaways for your money and arguably will be the ball more likely to be thrown around the office, as well as more likely to sit on the desk. The area for branding and impact is obviously smaller and possibly the novelty wears off much quicker.

Sizes available range from 11cm diam to 15cm diameter for the mini balls. Read the full size guide here.

Materials

The ball used by professionals and all major leagues are made from either TPU or PU – types of polyurethane. They have up to four layers of material and are hardwearing, retain shape and have a a ‘high retention bladder’ to keep the inflation for longer. For a sales promotion these types of match ball are expensive if the promotion does not actually involve the playing of the game at a high level. This is why we offer promotional level balls, which have two layers, and training balls which have three. Although these balls will not fall apart after being kicked once or twice, the long term durability is certainly affected.

The alternative is a PVC material which, with thinner and fewer layers will look exactly the same. The kids will have great fun with this in the garden and the impact is high. PVC can come in a range of finishes from a high shine gloss to a quite matt effect and whilst you will be wanting to print your logo to the ball you should be aware the PVC itself comes in a range of colours and this will help enhance the design.

If you are looking for a higher end giveaway you may wish to consider the vintage football look using a real leather. With traditional laces and that vintage look leather the product looks great – again not recommended for match play but a really high impact giveaway.

Panel Options

The traditional size 5 ball has 32 panels - but there are many other panel structure to choose from, ranging from 6 panel balls to 22 panels.

For promotional activity there are again trade-offs the more unusual the panel structure the more expensive the cutters and therefore the ball becomes. Also the larger the panels become the more area available for impactful branding but the danger is that the ball will lose shape. Large panels look greater but the ball may not be quite as spherical.

Our top tip for the size 5 ball is the 28 panel. Essentially a standard 32 traditional football but with a couple of "double panels" allowing for better branding opportunities.

For the mini ball, we recommend the 12 panel design. Although we can do 32 panels and have that classic look, the fewer panels there are, the larger the branding area will be, allowing your logo to be much larger and have more of an effect.

Quantity

For promotional work the aim here is have a volume which spreads the brand message as widely as possible. It is worth knowing however, that the balls are produced in either India, Pakistan or China. This means that a large percentage of the cost is due to the shipping across the globe and this shipping cost moves exponentially with volume. For a quantity of 25 balls nearly half the costs are shipping and this fall to around 15% for quantities of 500 (based on size 5). So the top tip is look carefully at the break point on volume because ball products are really sensitive to this.

When you're looking for a promotional product for your marketing campaign and are unsure of what to choose, it's easy enough to be lured in with a headline that reads "Top 5 Promotional Gifts". This is why you should not use these lists.